Rep. Marcy Toepel (R-Montgomery) joined a majority of legislators in passing a state budget that reprioritizes state spending to bring it in line with the financial realities facing Pennsylvania’s families.

“This is a responsible budget that can be sustained, unlike past budgets that handed off the hard choices to future legislatures,” Toepel said. “We’ve cut wasteful spending, killed ineffective programs, and closed a $4 billion structural deficit, all without raising taxes. Just as important, we were able to restore much of the funding to school districts that Gov. Tom Corbett proposed eliminating.”

The four school districts that serve the 147th District will receive the following increases above the amounts included in the proposed Corbett plan:

Boyertown Area School District: $583,387 for a total of $15.652 million.

Souderton Area School District: $502,693 for a total of $10.454 million.

Perkiomen Valley School District: $342,646 for a total of $7.205 million.

Upper Perkiomen School District: $460,642 for a total of $9.134 million.

The additional subsidies for each school district are dedicated to Basic Education Funding, Accountability Block Grants, and to help the districts fund Social Security payments.

The budget also preserves a “safety net” for those truly in need, restoring hospital and human services funding by more than $55 million.

Among these restorations are $12 million for domestic violence programs, $7 million for rape crisis services, $8.65 million for trauma units, $3.78 million for burn centers, and $15 million for the Human Service Development Fund.

“We were able to restore this funding by forcing inefficient programs to do more with less,” Toepel said.

The budget cut welfare spending by more than $400 million from Corbett’s original proposed budget.

“That’s a 3 percent reduction, well within the 4 percent ‘error rate’ the previous administration conceded was in the system,” Toepel said. “That’s the most important lesson from this budget process. We cannot tolerate waste and inefficiencies. The taxpayers cannot afford it.”